What is Eugenia Kim reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Eugenia Kim, author of The Kinship of Secrets.

Her entry begins:

Since 2017, there seems to have been an explosion of Korean American writers with debut work or new books, both fiction and nonfiction. This trend seems to also be reflected in the larger Asian American writing community as well, but there have been so many Korean American new publications I haven’t yet had the opportunity to expand out of this specific category. The acclaimed best-seller, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, stands out, as does Alexander Chee’s collection of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In the past two months, I’ve read several other KA authors, and this list happily continues to grow. I regularly read poetry to inspire my writing practice, and at the moment it is Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems, and...[read on]

About The Kinship of Secrets, from the publisher:

From the author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart.

In 1948 Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their infant daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her.

But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia, under the shadow of the daughter left behind, as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn’t remember. Najin and Calvin desperately seek a reunion with Inja, but are the bonds of love strong enough to reconnect their family over distance, time, and war? And as deep family secrets are revealed, will everything they long for be upended?

Told through the alternating perspectives of the distanced sisters, and inspired by a true story, The Kinship of Secrets explores the cruelty of war, the power of hope, and what it means to be a sister.

Visit Eugenia Kim's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Kinship of Secrets.

Writers Read: Eugenia Kim.

--Marshal Zeringue